Imposing ‘America first’ and motivating other nations to also focus on their own ‘sovereignty’ – as president Trump did during his address to the United Nations, yesterday – will further undermine the already fragile United Nations, the current international order.

It is a matter of time, before an international order in an anarchistic system becomes unstable and privileged states – like the United States in the current order – are challenged. International orders – including the United Nations – have a limited lifespan, because of their ‘built-in’ inability to change.

The United Nations can be considered the organisational ‘set-up’ of our current international order.

In a series of articles, I discuss the United Nations: Its purposes, the establishment of the United Nations and the process of social integration and expansion that preceded it, the urgent need for fundamental reform of the United Nations, and how this reform could be accomplished.

I will also explain that superficial reforms of the United Nations – which do not address the fundamental unbalance in the System – will cause a systemic crisis, as happened two times during the 20th Century.

Such a systemic crisis will cause a situation the United Nations is – according to its own purposes – supposed to prevent.

In the second article, I discuss how – and why – international orders are established, and what purposes they fulfil from a system’s perspective.

“Cho Tae-yul, the South Korean ambassador, and Ambassador Nikki Haley of the United States during a meeting of the United Nations Security Council on Monday to discuss North Korea’s nuclear tests. “The time has come for us to exhaust all of our diplomatic means before it’s too late,” Ms. Haley said” (source). But who is actually begging for war?

According to the US, North-Korea is “begging for war“. It is however a matter of perspective: The US – it can be argued – is begging for much more war, and not only in North Korea.